News Briefs: Manufacturers Reset Lobbying Strategy After Medicare Negotiation Loss

Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the drug industry’s most powerful lobbying group, has commissioned a major lobbying firm to review its failure to kill Medicare drug price negotiation, among other drug price reforms included in August’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Politico reported. The lobbying firm, BGR Group, will place its chairman and CEO, former HHS aide Bob Wood, in charge of the review. “Like most organizations, it’s our standard operating procedure to do an after-action review following a large-scale, organization-wide advocacy effort,” PhRMA spokesperson Brian Newell told Politico. 

Meanwhile, the Association for Accessible Medicines (AAM), a pharma lobbying group that represents generics manufacturers, is in the middle of leadership turmoil, according to STAT. AAM fired its president, Dan Leonard, and will replace him with the group’s current executive vice president of sciences and regulatory affairs, David Gaugh. Leonard denied he was fired, but anonymous sources told STAT that his ouster was also related to the passage of the IRA.